It’s long been rumored amongst law enforcement critics, but did you know that police departments officially disqualify high-scoring applicants? That’s not to say that all cops are stupid… Just that if you’re too smart, the police simply won’t hire you.

The policy became solidified as a concrete federal ruling almost a decade and a half ago with little fanfare from the mainstream media. Back in 1999, a Federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by a police applicant who was barred from the New London, Connecticut police force. The reason for the disqualification was literally because he had scored “too high” on an intelligence test. The department made it clear, they didn’t want the bottom of the barrel in terms of intelligence, but they didn’t want anyone “too smart” either.

The ruling made public in September of the same year, with the ruling judge Peter C. Dorsey of the United States District Court in New Haven confirming that it was in fact the case that the plaintiff, Robert Jordan, 48, who has a bachelor’s degree in literature, was denied an opportunity to even interview for a job with the New London Police Department, solely because of his high test scores.

Judge Dorsey, however, ruled that Mr. Jordan that there was no protection offered to intelligent people from discriminatory hiring practices by individual police departments. Why? Because, Dorsey explained, it was proven that police departments held all to this same standard and thus rejected all applicants who scored high.

So next time you cross paths with a cop and wonder how someone so stupid could get hired by their department, you now know that their stupidity might be the very thing that qualified them for the job.

exactly what kellie said . also, of course the corporate media didn’t pay attention to this ruling when it happened, but many of us have known about this for a very long time, and have been fighting against it

what we want are reasonable, intelligent, educated officers who understand the constitution and have a personal willingness to disobey illegal orders

Surprise surprise. Proof that cops are idiotic beyond description. Pigs rolling around in their own excrement and tracking it all over the world, leeching off of decent hard working people. Like ticks.

In 1967 I applied for a job as a cop in a small rural PD in California’s Central Valley. There were three persons on my oral exam; the Chief of the PD I was hoping to get on, a Captain from a neighboring rural PD and a CHP sergeant. The first two voted to fail me. The Captain wasn’t very smart, but he was a lot smarter than the Chief, who didn’t know what “forfeited the bail” (on a ticket) meant.

Is this true of all municipal police departments or are there exceptions to the rule? I haven’t heard that all police departments were required to use this standard of eliminating high scoring applicants.

Is there even one iota of evidence that this policy is even utilized by any other police force in the country, besides New London, CT? What a specious pile of crap…and I am a strong Liberal. But baseless claims like this, disparaging an entire group of people, are fodder for Right Wing publications. I don’t find this thoughtful or thought provoking. I find it intellectually lazy and something that our side should avoid like the plague.

Did you bother to read the article?? Or just look at the pictures. Seems you would be just the applicant their looking for. The Judge, Dorsey ADMITTED this policy was a proven fact. A FEDERAL judge at that. The fact that people like you feel this neither thoughtful or thought provoking is why this kind of policy can even be in ONE department which is one too many.

A proven fact in one city. But the article makes it sound like it is universal or common. That is not a rational or logical transition. There is nothing wrong with people having average IQs. Average isn’t stupid. It is elitist to assume that a few IQ points makes for a better person. It doesn’t. It would be thought provoking if the author could show that this policy is widespread….But one example does not a trend make. And if you think it does, maybe you need to brush up on your critical thinking skills before you disparage other people YOUR IQ may be average. Have you ever had it tested? There is no shame in having an average IQ, though mine tests a little less than 2 standard deviations above the norm. What the ruling says is that above average intelligence is not a protected class and if an employer finds that turnover is lower when higher IQ people are not hired, the judge found that to be perfectly legal.

It sure does explain a lot about what we see from your countries police force and it’s daily incidence of brutality. There is nothing wrong with having an average IQ if one is doing an average job. However in most countries I’d like to think we’d aim higher for at least some recruits to a job that impacts the welfare of the citizen to that extent.

First of all, this country does not have just one police force. There are as many police forces as there are states, counties, municipalities, etc. Second, higher IQ does not translate, necessarily, to a better cop. Some people are high in analytical thinking, but not so great in dealing with people. For someone who is geared towards their own ends, a higher IQ may make it easier for them to figure out how to work the system. My point was that you cannot take one example, of one lawsuit, 14 years ago, by a disgruntled, wannabe cop, and extrapolate that to the idea that police departments go out of their way to hire dumb people. It would be nice to have an easy answer as to why this horrific problem is occurring so frequently. However, just like with anything else, taking lazy correlation as causation lines of non-reasoning only obscures the picture and takes us further away from identifying the REAL issues. There is no way that one law suit can explain the entirety of this problem. You get some studies that link average IQ to higher police brutality and/or higher IQ to lower police brutality, then you might be getting somewhere.

Where did you study statistics because you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. “For a data set, the terms arithmetic mean, mathematical expectation, and average are used synonymously to refer to a central value of a discrete set of numbers: specifically, the sum of the values divided by the number of values. ” 100 is the mean or average. How could the average be one standard deviation from itself. That would be 68.27 percent of the data set which is far greater than average. For a disputer of bullshit you seam to spout a lot of it.

“Liberals” are the most enthusiastic supporters of wars of aggression and the police state. Normal people only need to be around to know that cops are as dumb as a turd and that this is a nationwide policy.

The test scores this department was hiring equated to an IQ of about 104. At best.
The folks involved in the lawsuit stated very plainly that they did not hire smarter candidates because “Retention rates suffered among officers with higher test scores.”
This was a lawsuit in one spot in the country, but it has been cited by departments across the country. Sort of a precedent.
In any case, you needn’t worry. Clearly, you are not and have not tried to join the police department in your town,or I suspect that you might score a bit too highly on the test, and then you’d be suing too.
Now we just need to help you find out what a lot of us have; That our IQs did not protect us from being naive, and having that taken advantage of, by some bad guys dressed up as heroes…..

Nicely put. But the fact that I don’t like hyperbolic arguments built on flimsy evidence does not mean that I am naive about the police. However, the problems in law enforcement in this country need to be thoroughly studied. Making assumptions based on correlation is not going to solve the problem. Having an average IQ does not make a person less moral, or more prone to corruption. Neither does a high IQ make a person superior. There is much more to the story than simply IQ and poking fun and insinuating that the problem is that all cops are dumb is simply not helpful.

I don’t think the point is so much that guys with this IQ are gonna be inherently worse. It’s the fact that our leaders think they are, and overtly plan our police forces to be corruptible.
I have interviewed a lot of people surrounding police corruption( I became sort of an activist after I got a DWI walking from the store to the hotel I was staying in so I could drink with my buddies and NOT drive) and so far, the universal truth about good cops is; They either move on to a small town police organization that is still honest, or they quit.
Out here in Albuquerque, the cops all said they joined wanting to help society, and learned really quickly that they were gonna be expected to be criminals for a corrupt set of politicians, who were using the APD to put the homeless in jail, steal money from the public, whatever.
The politicians don’t wanna disappoint you by raising your taxes. You’d vote for the other guy. So they run short on funds, leave your taxes alone, and pull you over every chance they get and write you tickets for bullshyt “Crimes”
The honest guys don’t want any part of it.
The guys who are willing to stay, once disillusioned? Those are guys who were bouncing the door at the local skin bar. Big, slow, angry tough guy types, who end up getting paid waaaaay more than the $9 an hour they deserve, given their skill set. The results are demonstrably disastrous.
Thing is, the politicians(mayors, judges, DAs, you know, politicians) can’t accuse them of crimes, fire them, prosecute them when they kill some guy by shooting him in the back( You may have heard of James Boyd. There were 42 cops on scene, and they called a green kid, off duty, to come and bring his $3,000-$4,000 rifle to shoot him while he was trying to lie down for them). If they indict these guys, these guys will scream”The Politicians made me do it!! They make us do all kinds of illegal stuff!” and then can you imagine where we’d be?
Dumber people are more easily led, but that may be a specious argument. Let’s just theorize that the guys who were hired were dumb enough not to be getting anywhere in their lives before they found the police force…..
The smarter guys were probably already doing okay elsewhere……

I am pretty sure a higher IQ makes a person superior in intelligence. The other attributes are not correlated with intelligence. So the end result is when other factors are equal; higher intelligence makes one superior. Clearly other measures like the Meyers Briggs personality test would be better suited in determining which people are interested in doing the job. Given the right personality I think higher IQ would be superior. But those dummies currently doing the hiring can’t figure that out because they have average intelligence.

First of all, there is no scientific validity whatsoever to the Meyers Briggs test. It was not developed by Carl Jung, but by 2 women who worked in the Personnel business and had read Jung. It has never been validated through any kind of real research, even though many have tried. Secondly, is a person with a high IQ and anti-social personality disorder superior to a person with a normal personality and average IQ? In police work, a higher IQ could just as easily be associated with somebody who is more successful in figuring out how to game the system. The issue really isn’t with who has an interest in doing the job. George Zimmerman had a strong interest in doing the job but psych testing kept him out. One can want to do a job, but find that, once one is doing the job, it is more tedious and stressful than one imagined. I would not assume that you know more about hiring successful police candidates than the people who do it for a living. Some of them may suck, as some of every job or profession sucks, but armchair observers aren’t necessarily better.

Silly argument. As I said IQ is not a predictor of immorality or your example of antisocial behavior. You don’t have an understanding of Meyers Briggs if you think what I am talking about is someone like Zimmerman. you lost me with your last statement.. Armchair observers are not better? Is that a personal attack on me?

Another thing. If you ask anyone who scores as a SENSOR on Meyers Briggs they will say that the test means nothing. Ask anyone who scores as INTUITIVE and they will be all excited about the result and reading their profiles. I would bet you and the other people who try and discredit the test are all sensors. Just an informed guess, but it would be interesting to administer the test to these scientists to find out.

Whoever set the policy most likely came to this conclusion after realizing that higher intelligence was a common factor in many officers who quit. What’s ridiculous is the reasoning they use to justify it. Saying they will get bored is complete BS, but it seems believable to most. The real reason they leave is because at some point they disagree with department policy’s that tell them who to discriminate against, what type of force to use in certain situations, exactly how to act regardless of circumstances, etc. Apparently asking questions, and using your brain to conclude a fair and logical solution, is a detrimental flaw in a police officer.

This is worst case scenario for our police departments. They are now foot soldiers ready to take and execute orders without thought, and are now equipped with military equipment to go along with the training. It seems our government has prepared your local PD for a civil war.

In ’99 I applied to join the police force. I took the interview, and they liked me. I passed the physical test. I took the aptitude test. They sat me down and told me to my face that my IQ was too high for the job. The BS line they fed me was, “We’ve found that people with a high IQ tend to get bored with this job.”

I called them on it immediately… “No, smart people would question orders, dont’ you think? I know I would…”
That’s when they escorted me from the building.
Yup. Cops are stupid. The best way to stop police brutality is to raise smart children. If everyone is smart, then no one can qualify to be a cop, and no more cops will shoot kids carrying Wii controller’s…

I still think that in order to be an LEO you need to have a masters degree and take classes at a high level in sociology and psychology. It is a very difficult job and one should be highly educated and prepared for a wide range of situations.

so they won’t question authority!easier to control than a smart cop who can determine right from wrong!don’t want the cops to turn on the hand that feeds it(gov’t)stupid cops will just go and follow orders without question if they are dumb enough!..the proof is in the pudding!!

I think that most of the people who have commented here would be quite disappointed if they were to take an IQ test. Average is called average for a reason. That is because that is where most people fall. Average does not mean dumb. It simply means like most other people. So the idea that cops with average IQs are somehow below average IQ demonstrates that the commenters are, themselves, average.